... But I have had cause lately to see that men love their children quite
as much as women, in a way mysterious to women. And so I got to thinking
about Joseph, who is surely one of the most famous adoptive fathers. I'm
sure he too looked up at the sky and said, "God, I hope I do this right."

Breakfast was an omelette with leftover pesto -- Colleen made
wonderful fresh pesto last night for dinner.

Spent my time alone in the morning (I get up much earlier than the flower_cat) doing some much-needed but basically uninteresting
maintenance on my email foldering system, and going through most of the
unread mail in my "misc" folder. Added a "friends" folder.

After breakfast, the Cat and I went up to San Francisco for the Chihuly
exhibit at the de Young
Museum. Amazing. Indescribable. If there's one near you, go see
it. Also some amazing paper art by Jane Hammond. Lunch in the museum
cafe; tasty (we both had the lamb curry), but the rice was
underdone--they're clearly running a bit beyond their capacity with the
Chihuly crowds. No problems with the wheelchair, though I need to
remember to ask whether she's ready to roll after she's been in one place
for a while; sometimes she puts her feet down.

Nice drive back by way of the Great Highway, State Route 1 past Devil's
Slide to Half Moon Bay, and 92 back to I280. Tempting to take 1 down all
the way to Santa Cruz, but we really didn't have the time.

Walked around the Rose Garden. You know that pain in the ball of my foot
that I mentioned yesterday and the day
before? Had it again, even with my Keen hiking boots. Something
bruised, I think. The running shoes seem to have the best padding; may
have to use those plus an ankle brace for a while.

Spent the evening puttering, and attempting to diagnose Colleen's
dual-boot desktop machine in the bedroom, and Kat's HP Ubuntu box. Oddly
enough, both worked fine for me (though the HP doesn't seem to recognize
the monitor size through a KVM switch even when X is restarted; it may
have to boot with the monitor switched in). Loose connections, maybe.
That, or I scared them into working.

These are some of my works commissioned by various NASA facilities. They are offered here to provide something like definitive digital versions of such images for anyone who wants to have them. You paid for them and they're yours.

The server seems to be quite slow, unfortunately. It may be best to wait a day or so.

The National Space Society (NSS) is looking for artists to create visions of a spacefaring future — a future of space settlement, be it on the Moon, on Mars, on asteroids, or orbiting independently in space. To bring attention to our goal of creating a spacefaring future, NSS is sponsoring a contest for such artwork to be used in a calendar promoting a future of humans living and working in space. The best of the submitted artwork will be selected for inclusion in the 2008 NSS Space Settlement Calendar. Judges include world-renowned space artists David A. Hardy and Pat Rawlings.

So, there's this British guy who makes street art by selectively cleaning the grime off of dirty walls.

The tools are simple: A shoe brush, water and elbow grease, he says.

British authorities aren’t sure what to make of the artist who is creating graffiti by cleaning the grime of urban life. The Leeds City Council has been considering what to do with Moose. "I’m waiting for the kind of Monty Python court case where exhibit A is a pot of cleaning fluid and exhibit B is a pair of my old socks," he jokes.

A pleasant day out with the flower_cat. Our stick-in-the-mud
daughters seem to have little interest in art museums, long drives, and
seafood restaurants. Their loss, and it's cheaper.

We started by taking advantage of our family membership in the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco to get us in to the Monet in Normandy exhibit at
the Palace of the
Legion of Honor. Drove up I280, as usual. Had lunch at the museum
cafe (tasty, though not particularly cheap) -- I had the halibut, and the
Cat had the antipasto plate. Then went to the Monet exhibit.

The light! There were some astounding seascapes. I was
struck by one in particular, of a beach with stones showing darkly through
the receding tail of a wave. Walk a few feet closer and it all disolves
into disconnected brushstrokes. There were some fantastic views of waves
that the flower_cat particularly liked. And the waterlilies,
of course. Dropped about $80 in the museum bookstore. Dangerous places,
those bookstores. Afterwards, upstairs, there were three rooms of Rodin
sculptures. Rooms with walls of white marble, bathed in light. (Some of
my favorites, but not all. Between the Legion of Honor and the Stanford
museum thirty miles south in Palo Alto, I can see most of them.

We drove back along the coast on Route 1. The Devil's Slide section,
between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, was just reopened last week. I caught
a few glimpses of the sea below the cliffs, dark blue and filled with
sailboats. Not quite the colors of Monet's paintings, but real enough.

Sixty miles or so down the coast, we headed East from Santa Cruz on
Highway 9, winding up through the redwoods past Felton, Ben Lomond, Big
Basin, and down past Skyline Drive into Saratoga. All told, a pleasant
three hour trip -- it only took one hour going up, but wasn't nearly as
pretty.

The kids had no interest in a "fancy" seafood restaurant, so we went by
ourselves to the Yankee Pier in nearby Satan's Santana Row.
It's dangerously close to a kitchen-gadget store called Sur la Table, so
of course we went in, coming out with a pyrex measuring cup (replacing the
one that broke a couple of months ago), an OXO jar opener, and a
large Kyocera vegetable peeler. Mangos are cheap this month.